When the Pirate Prays. James B. Johnson

      BORGO PRESS BOOKS BY JAMES B. JOHNSON

      Counterclockwise: A Science Fiction Novel

      Habu: A Science Fiction Novel

      Trekmaster: A Science Fiction Novel

      When the Pirate Prays: A Comic Crime Novel

      COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

      Copyright © 2013 by James B. Johnson

      Published by Wildside Press LLC

      www.wildsidebooks.com

      DEDICATION

      For everybody I know and some I don’t; but I especially dedicate this book to good and faithful readers across the land.

      QUOTATION

      When the pirate prays, there is great danger.

      —Dr. Thomas Fuller,

      Gnomoloqia: Adages and Proverbs

      I did some illegal stuff at the time and now the statute of limitations must have kicked in. Wild things happened, not all of them my fault, but enough. Since then, people have moved on, they’ve died, or are otherwise long gone. I didn’t use real names, not all of them anyway. So now, after all these years, the story can be told.

      —Billy Birthday

      1: MONDAY, 6:30 A.M.

      He wasn’t a bad fellow—even if he was out jogging. We picked him up at the old Port Boca Grande Lighthouse on account of the storm squalls boiling off the Gulf of Mexico. I didn’t recognize him then because of his four-day growth of beard and the fact he was wetter than a guppy on bath day.

      “Another storm without a name,” he said, not even breathing hard after running against the wind and rain. His black hair was pasted back in a cinematic over-done fashion.

      The three of us in the cab of my green ’66 Chevy pickup steamed the windows and, along with the now-lashing rain outside, made it difficult to see where I was driving.

      I double-clutched down to second and left it there hoping it was only my imagination that the Gulf was looping over the dunes and onto the road already. Here at the southern tip of the island was where the pirate José Gaspar, in a fit of murderous rage a couple of hundred years ago, beheaded a princess. The mental image made me shiver, for I superimposed the vision of this intriguing good-looking woman with different color eyes back at the hotel. I love a pony tail anyway, and this intriguing woman, she had a pony tail I’d kill for. Not only that, but she smelled good and, something I didn’t understand yet, she had a case of the hiccups you wouldn’t believe. Her name was Mary Lynn.

      Tapes sat in the middle, his long Texas legs jammed into his chest from straddling the hump. “This ain’t the most fun I’ve had in a long time.”

      “Me, neither,” I said. I’d just had to see the lighthouse one more time before we left. It is my intention to visit every lighthouse in America before I die—and Canada, too, if I should live that long. We have upward of 440 or 450, including Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. And there are a couple of lighthouses on St. Paul Island and the Main-à-Dieu Light on Scatari Island, Nova Scotia I’ve been looking forward to visiting. I couldn’t figure out where Gaspar buried the headless woman. It’s said her ghost at times wanders the beach looking for her head. Ugh. I looked, but never saw her—probably too windy.

      I had the Chevy GT’s wipers on max. Wind and rain buffeted the truck rudely. The green truck was long past truck social security age but performed like it was forty years younger. We were now driving north on Gulf Boulevard.

      The jogger leaned forward. He wore running shoes and blue shorts and orange shirt which had THE SKY IS BLUE AND THE SUN IS ORANGE SO GOD MUST BE A GATOR written on it, referring to the University of Florida Gators and their colors. In addition to the scrubby face, he had thick dark eyebrows and a wide cutting jawline.

      “There’s something familiar about this guy,” I told Tapes, straining to think.

      A strong gust blew my GT onto the shoulder of the road, and likely sand-blasted the left side.

      We’d been on the very southernmost tip of Gasparilla Island for one last look at the lighthouse, wanting to see it at sunrise. Unfortunately, the storm had generated overnight and squalls had blown in right after we got to the Old Port Boca Grande Lighthouse. Now we were heading back to the JG Inn to have breakfast, pack our stuff, and leave. I wanted to return to the mainland, head south and see the Sanibel Island Lighthouse. The jogger had made the same mistake we had and we offered him a ride back to the tiny town.

      “There is something familiar about me,” said the jogger with a disarming smile.

      “I told you so,” I said. “Is this twenty questions?” When I’m out of sorts, I tend to have a sharp tongue. Right now I didn’t need to split my attention between driving in the storm and verbal sparring.

      “Look, Shortcut, if he wants us to know who he is he’ll tell us.” Tapes took out his tin of Copenhagen, shook his head, and returned it to his pocket. He was trying to quit. He’s got a great deal of willpower and likely would succeed. On the other hand, maybe Tapes was in fact human and having a difficult time weaning himself from nicotine.

      We passed the Rear Range Lighthouse, a straight metal cylinder with a lattice-work of struts and supports. The Old Port Boca Grande Lighthouse is a wooden structure like an old Southern home, with wraparound porches on three sides of the first level. The next level up was like a crow’s nest, a pudgy neck to the building before you get to the top level. Which is the light itself, a third order Fresnel lens, surrounded by a wooden catwalk. It was three-and-a-half power with a red flash every twenty seconds. I’d timed it. The whole thing rested on pilings so that wind and water could pass through. It was one of the thirty formal and official lighthouses in Florida. When we finished seeing them, we were going to return to Arizona where I needed a job, having just quit mine in disgust, and Tapes already had a job mothballing aircraft in Tucson, passing, of course, through God’s Country, otherwise known as Texas, our birthplace and frequent home. My job had been in Tallahassee and when Becky and I broke up—

      “Got it,” I said.

      “Windmills or lighthouses?” Tapes asked rhetorically.

      We argued about damn near everything. This particular ongoing argument was whether windmills were more aesthetic than lighthouses. I liked lighthouses better than windmills. Tapes preferred windmills. ’Course, lighthouses always had the best locations and scenery.

      “Neither,” I said. “He is familiar.” I hooked my thumb toward the jogger. His approximate age, forty-five, finally led me to it.

      “Well?” Tapes demanded.

      “Henry Beauchamps Gonzáles,” I said smugly.

      Tapes scratched his head which was brushing the roof of the cab. “Name’s familiar.”

      “You’re from Texas and Arizona and don’t need to know Florida stuff,” I said. “The beard and drowned hair disguised him. Besides, people don’t look the same in person as they do on television on the news.”

      Gonzáles looked like he wanted to pull his hair out we were taking so long to acknowledge him. A little vanity never hurt nobody.

      “The Democrat Governor of Florida,” Tapes said.

      Gonzáles nodded emphatically.

      “How come you’re out jogging alone?” I asked, keeping my voice neutral, for running wasn’t anything I was near fond of. Neither was Tapes.

      “This island is my home. I own the José Gaspar Inn. I live there, too. I jog every morning and my assigned Florida Highway Patrol trooper feels it’s safe enough before dawn.”

      There it was again. Everything around here named for the nasty hombre himself. José Gaspar had kidnapped, imprisoned, raped women all along this coast, not to mention your basic pillaging and plundering. Say 1873, until he killed himself